The Apprentice: Series four, episode seven

Last week, some brilliant young business minds were put in a room and set to task coming up with some of the best ideas the country may ever see. Somewhere. But we don't know who they are. Meanwhile, some donks on television tried to come up with greetings cards, and made a complete toilet of it.

This week, it's The Apprentice Abroad, just like those terrible episodes of Eastenders where they all go on holiday, but with more suits and bartering, and less death and sex. Unless we get lucky. I'll be here from 9pm following the episode on BBC1 and then moving over to BBC2 for Yer Fiyud!, though as always, without quite knowing why. Any observations, denigrations, inspirations or general snark, deposit them all in the comment box below. Click read more to read more, hit refresh for updates and new comments.

I cannot go on, incidentally, without paying some lip service to the fine defence of the English language following the task last week in which the candidates attempted to create card celebrating 'A Day For People. The debate on how that should be shortened (and apostrophised) raged all week, and should be noted. So. Thank you. Last week was all greetings card idiocy in front of the clients and nasty bullying pack mentality behind the scenes - surely this has to be resolved in some way, doesn't it? Does the BBC really want to leave us with the feeling that no, no, there really is no hope for humanity after all? Apart from Raef?

Now. We have heard some interesting rumours about this week. We've heard that bad business is done - as usual, but this week in Morocco, and with added badness to the business. We have heard that some nefarious act is committed by one or more of the ten remaining besuited weasels. We've heard that Surallun gets really very cross (about aforementioned nefariousity), and that there may well be a double firing. Oh, and someone editor Jason met at a party last night said it was 'really good'. With insider plaudits like that, I can barely hang on to my trousers!

Two candidates to go - but if it's based on shady dealings, I have NO way of conjecturing who. Bother. Oh, except one of the team leaders is Lee, and after his nasty display of Sara-bullying last night we wouldn't mind if it is him. What do YOU think? Back at nine.

9pm: "This ... is the job interview from hell" says Master Voiceover. "Your prize ... is working with me" Says Surallun. Which logically makes him Satan, lord of the dark forces. And where are the dark forces? Ah, here they are.

And we're finding out what they did last week. Which we already know. They made cards with. "Here have a card, because you're not going to be getting any sexual relations this week, are you?" and "Please recycle this unwanted piece of cardboard. Thank you." Written on them.

9.03: 7am, and the candidates are up and waiting for news from Surallun. Chinny McGinger is wearing pyjamas and a hooded dressing gown, like the mistress of evil she is. Michael Sophocles apparently sleeps standing up in his suit. Lucinda appears to have for nightwear a long stripy gown that wouldn't look bad on an ewok. And doesn't, in fact.

The phonecall comes. They're going to Marrakesh.

9.06: Lee is going to be leading Alpha, a team which now contains Sara (oooooooh); Jennifer is leading Rennai ... Rene ... the other one.

They're flicking through the pictures of the ten things they have to find. They stop on an alarm clock shaped like a mosque that gives a adhan call to prayer thing as an alarm. "Ooooh! I HAVE one of theeee ... I mean I know what this is! I have seen one!" says Sara. I envy her. I have always wanted one. Either that or one in the shape of a cow that goes 'Mooo!' Is that incendiary? I do hope not. I don't mean it to be.

9.07: Lee is keen on phoning everybody before going places, Jennifer just wants to get out into the souk and see what's out there first. Both have their benefits, although the second one has at least the main benefit of not having to spend much time sitting around with Lee.

Lee is trying to rally his team with a 360 decibel motivaltion speech. "YEEEAAAAAAH! All RIiiiiiiiiiiiiiight!" he yells, tiresomely. Just imagine working in a sales environment with that man. Yes. Now stop wincing and holding your hands over your ears or you'll miss the rest of the programme.

9.11: The researchless other team, meanwhile, have wandered into the market and discovered one of the things they need! It is a crappy little juicer, and is being sold for £75. Their target price is half that. They get a pound off. Whoa. Hold on to your bootees, we're in for a bumpy ride.

9.14: I'm sitting here and I'm waiting for something very contentious to happen. It isn't happening yet. All I am seeing is a lot of pasty British people wandering around a souk in a suit and sweating.

Well not a suit. Only some of the more buttoned-up boys are wearing suit shirts. But it was a nice sentence.

The haggling techniques are interesting. Speaking no Arabic and none of them, Not ONE amongst them speaking French, it seems, most of them are relying on speaking the fluent 'Chipsnbeans' that one might normally employ in a beachside fast food establishment on a hot Mediterranean island. "I WANTEE THIS? IT IS TOO MUCH. MORE LESS PRICE, YES?" they shout.

9.20: One team got a cowhide for £50, one third of the target price. Raef, however, got a deal. They went straight to the tannery, and suddenly someone was offering him one for 250 dirham. Which, at £15 was an incredible price, but the worst piece of haggling in hagglistory. "250 dirham please" "250?!" shouts Raef in disbelief. "Yes, 250 please" "250?!" Oh walk AWAY, man!

9.24: We have the evilness! Hang on, I type it up.

9.25: Alright, both teams both went to the same shop for tennis rackets which, because 'Surallun is a keen tennis player' have to be medium strung. Jenny Celeriac (aka Chinny McGinger) and Michael Sophocles have just discovered they're on the same track, and are offering the tennis shop people money in order to say they can't string it in time.

Outside the shop, Jenny is chinbilant: "We have just been involved in espionage!" she shouts down the phone to her team leader, Jennifer.

Oh, well DONE, that woman.

9.29: Sorry about the bold, everyone, should be back to normal now. I just considered it all VERY important.

9.32: There have been other things; the crucial differences between kosher and halal. The colour of alarm clocks. The really quite impoliteness of shouting abscenities down a phone in a silent pottery shop in a muslim country. Or any country, in fact. But the important thing is this:

Alpha bought all the items correctly, no penalties, and spent £413. The Other Lot spent 449.60. But there are two items they're disallowing, so there are two items with penalties, so they actually spent just over £600.

Jennifer, Alex, Michael Sophocles, Jenny, Claire, you know where you're going. And it ain't anywhere treatish. No, it is the boardroom.

9.36: Important to note: when Nick was telling Surallun how well the teams did, he made special mention of the negotiating skills of both Sara and Lady Ribenaberet. They were very good, too. Later, Raef compliments Lee's managerial skills. Even though it was clearly Raef who was in charge, frankly. Not that I'm a puppet of the Apprentice editors, of course. No no no.

9.39: Back in the boardroom, we go through the items they failed so spectacularly to buy.

"Michael, you put on your CV that you're a good Jewish boy. Do you know what the word Kosher means? You went to a halal butcher, and asked for a kosher chicken, which you then asked a preacher to make a prayer over. Why did you not just go find a catholic priest and ask him to take the thing's confession?" Says Surallun, who is, frankly, on fire. Michael mumbles something about being half-Jewish and not really knowing much about it all. "Why did you put that on your CV? You think I'd treat you differently? You think I'd be kind to you"

Michael looks as if he would quite like to sink into his shirt. He looks like a little schoolboy being berated. He is.

jenny tries to spectacularly lie. "I was just counting on Michael to know what it was because of being Jewish." "You just said you didn't know kosher was a Jewish thing?" Said Surallun. Busted, lady. Bust Ed.

9.46: Surallun throws all the candidates out of the boardroom and says they're all just coming back in again. Ah, THIS is the bit where he says he wishes he could fire all of them, then...

9.48: "It seems to me that you hang on every word I say, and then try and turn it back on your colleagues." Jenny opens and closes her chin in defence. "You're fired" says Surallun, calmly and dismissively. "Leave, goodbye"

And she's gone.

JENNY! FIRED already! Chinny McGinger, please be careful of the door as I believe it may have a tendency to hit people on the arse on their way out and ... Oh! I'm sorry, did my relentless monotone businesslike chuntering cause you to get door smacked upon your exit? My deepest apologies.

Byeeeeeeeeee!

9.50: Wow. I missed it, but according to akili In the comments box, Michael Sophocles just crossed himself. This man's a stunning interfaith dialogue all by himself. He should be employed by the government.

Alex has been sent home to think about all the things he might have done - and, you know, his hair - Claire, Jennifer and Michael Sophocles are coming back in. One of them's leaving a little wet trail on the way back. I think it's Michael.

9.54: "Jenny instigated the bribing. It was her idea" whines Michael Sophocles back in the boardroom.

Jennifer is admitting she may have possibly lost a little control. And, though she's not my favourite person in the group, looking marvellous in yellow silk. She may give off a chill like she's just fallen out of a glacier, but my god that woman can carry a blouse.

Michael begs for 'one more try" Claire tries to argue that she's not an overtalkative little whirlwind. Jennifer gives it all she has - arguing control issues and blaming everyone else in the world (or everyone else in Europe, of whence she is the best salesperson)(Erm. In) but her.

He fires...

Jennifer Jennifer, Yer Fiyud. Bye bye bye.

All the Jennifers have left the building. Well thank crumpety for that. It was very confusing for the typing. That was probably why they did it. For me.

Well, if that is true; can I just say thanks, but, you know. Keeping Michael Sophocles in? REALLY? Are you Stupid?

9.59: Right, now, over to BBC2 for Yer Fiyud proper - and I'm actually interested for once, to see how they're going to do this...

10pm: I honestly thought the tennis racket was going to cause more kerfuffle than the chicken. I even, in a panic, prepared something in advance about how angry Surallun was about xxx bad thing that had happened. But then he was actually quite calm. And, you know, bribery, corruption, must not be that bad. Not as bad as getting really stupidly confused about chicken death. And then lying about it. Over and over again.

10.05: Chinny McGinger arrives and, as is usual on this show, is meeker and quieter and more mousy than we are used to. She still has an air hostess scarf, of course. But now she has a feathery cut and a marvellous fringe which really does go some way toward softening her lower face, even though it is at the top. I have still not forgiven her for her nasty shouty bullying treatment of Lady Ribenaberet/everyone.

The panel: Michelle Mone, owner of some kind of fancy underkecks firm, says that bribery is a bad business practice. Financial guru Alvin Hall has a good laugh about chickens or something, which I cannot concentrate on because I am staring at his bowtie and willing it to spin around. Vanessa Feltz talks about sticking her arm up chickens right to the elbow, and what makes them kosher (it is not that).

10.11: The bullying is addressed.

Vanessa Feltz: "You were older than the others, and you behaved despicably. You victimised other people, you were nasty, you were rude. And I think you swallowed some kind of manual that says that successful businesswomen need to be aggressive, abusive and unpleasant and that isn't true. It isn't necessary to be obnoxious to work in business."

Now that's the first time ever that I have quoted Vanessa Feltz wholesale, but she had a good point, so there. I'm not sure she's ever seen this show before - nor that it applies only to women, they're all a bunch of flying geeshknockers, as far as I'm concerned - but it was a good quote.

Michelle Mone: "Why is it that businesswomen feel they need to backstab and behave like this in order to get by?" Comes another sisterly outcry - about which I'm sure there'll be intelligent comment pieces in other bits of the site by people who actually know two buttons about the business world over the next few days.

Ah, we're talking about Michael. Alvin and Adrian speak again. Now they can talk without fear of the women straining to hear through that glass ceiling.

10.20: We roll on to the second interview, and, thankfully, though that main episode didn't quite live up to the hype (for me)(though it was brilliant, don't get me wrong)(Just not as good as ... I'm going to get out of brackets now, I think) this episode of Yer Fiyud is working a lot better than they usually do. Mainly because they're having to rattle through the interviews in order to get both done. So no extraneous interviews with audience members, or endless VT sections of the episode we've only just seen. Just post-match interviews.

So next week, cut the analysis down to 15 minutes, yes beeb? K thx.

10.25: Sorry, Jennifer's being doing her interview, but it wasn't as interesting, so I haven't really been listening so hard.

She's wearing less harsh eyeliner though, and a lovely white dress, her hair is softer which frames her face in a more complimentary way and My GOD I seem to have turned into a Woman's Own columnist. Excuse me.

She really regrets not having done any research on this task - or, in fact, many tasks - but mainly this task; as it means they lost. Irretrievably. If only she'd read the dossier in which Surallun listed the items they had to buy before actually going to buy them. If only. It sounds so obvious now. Or, you know, just in general. because it is obvious.

Lee's impressions of dinosaurs are widely discussed. Apparently, he does that all the time, Jennifer says. Michelle Mone says that Lee represents exactly what the business world is like (like a large hairy man doing a dinosaur impression. I'm not wearing HER underwear). Alvin says that dinosaur impressions might go down very well in the bedroom, but not so much in the business world. Really? Do they? REALLY? I'm not saying I *would* have sex with Alvin Hall to find out if they really do; but I'd be interested in speaking to anyone who has.

10.30: And that is it.

Next week; wedding dresses, which is just going to be a mine of fun. And, interestingly, footage of Raef making idiot anti-fat-lass gags. Watch it, posh boy.

In the meantime, thank you for your comments and your kind attention. next week, same time, yes? Oh, and if you're reading this, H Factor - you didn't miss that much, and get better soon.